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Thank you for your perspective. It's quite helpful. However, I wouldn't even a plain text searchable database be better than nothing? And I don't understand how this can be monopolized by Westlaw when law should be public domain…

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Getting free or low cost access to a plain text searchable database is no longer a problem for lawyers. It was 8-10 years ago, but since the entry of Google Scholar (and Casetext, Ravel, and a half dozen or so other providers) getting access to the law is no longer difficult. To echo the original post, the law today is in a place like the "deep, dark, early days of the Web, using search engines like Lycos and Alta Vista". We do need a "Google for the law," but Google isn't good enough to be that. It's a very hard problem to create a good search engine for the law, but legal search engines will eventually get there.

The law is public domain. At least in the federal system, and increasingly in most state systems, everything is published as PDFs on courts' websites.

But being public domain doesn't mean someone is required to OCR and host it for you. And it doesn't mean someone needs to go and OCR all the hundreds of years of old cases and OCR and host those.

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